Physique and Features

Starting With A Bang!

In one if our previous features, we gave the Powercolor PCS+ HD7950 3GB a good workout to ascertain the capabilities of AMD’s new Southern Island line of GPUs. And while we were somewhat disappointed at the lack of significant performance boost when running on PCIe 3.0, we were nonetheless satisfied with the new offering from AMD. This time around, we will be taking a look at ASUS’ take on the HD 7950 in the form of the ASUS HD 7950 DirectCU II TOP.

As what the ‘TOP’ designation suggests, the HD 7950 DirectCU II TOP is part of ASUS’ higher-end offerings and is in fact the best offering for their AMD HD 7950 lineup. This generally indicates a powerfully-overclocked graphics card that features ASUS’ distinct black and red cooler, which incidentally also shares a similar color scheme with the Republic of Gamers (ROG) label. The card itself is massive, easily occupying three slots mostly due to ASUS’ custom cooler. However, the extra slots are designed, not to be occupied by additional display outputs, but simply to vent excess heat.

As mentioned earlier, the card is pre-overclocked out-of-the-box with a core frequency of 900MHz and memory clock of 5000MHz. This core configuration is 100MHz more than the standard HD 7950 with the possibility of going higher which we will ascertain later on as to how far we can push this version of the HD 7950.